I would just get a Chieftec mid-twoer to use as the case, and spend the left over money on HD space. Because a nice case won't do a bit of good if you don't have anywhere near enough room for those HuffyUV DVD rips.

BTW, do you absolutely have to go with the high-end P4 route? As klinky said, you could drop to a lower speed that will OC rather well. You could go with an AMD setup and save some money there, and not really lose any processing power.

My suggestion isn't to get the P4. Save a hundred bucks or two, and buy an AMD Athlon Xp2200+. A recent benchmark test shows that an AMD Athlon Xp2200+ (Or was it 2100+? I think it was 2100+..) at 1.8GhZ (Or 1.73GHz for 2100+) beat a P4 2.53GHz PC.

Actually I use a AThlon XP 1.4Ghz, I like AMD and they're a good value. If you want a P4 that's fine. I always like getting the most bang for my buck and I don't really who it's from. Wayy back when I wanted to get a Cel300 and oc' it to 533Mhz as that was the hot ticket back then. Then the Duron600 came out and that was the hot ticket, I actually got one and clocked it up to 950Mhz ~stable~. I made most of my AMVs on that system.

I believe the P4 will give you better perfomance in things like 2D content creation as it's got a big memory bus and things like SSE2. The Athlon is excellent for 3D things(gaming, 3ds, lightwave) since it's got a nice FPU.

I wouldn't spend that much on a case. You can pick up a case for about $30 or $40. The difference would be better spent on a hard drive, or maybe some extra RAM. The former being the more important of the two.

You got problems if you have a crappy fan. While it is true that P4's can slow themselves down when the fan dies, there are options in most BIOS that allow them to shutdown if it gets too hot.

The chance of a fan dying is very unlikely, but possible

Not really the main reason someone shouldn't buy a AMD cpu as speedstep didn't start showing up for the desktop until later model PIIIs were introduced. We all know that even a 200Mhz cpu can fry itself if the fan dies. So that feature not being available obviously didn't stop millions of people from buying those other cpus.